


The Miracle That You're Here at All

by lurknomoar



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brief Medical Horror, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Espionage, Five Plus One, M/M, Mention Of Genocide, Mirror Universe (Star Trek), What-If, Xenobiology and xenolinguistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-10-29 23:55:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20805086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Five things that could have happened to Mirror Hugh Culber and one thing that should have happened to Mirror Paul Stamets, in a universe of violence, treachery and desperate, rebellious hope.





	The Miracle That You're Here at All

**Author's Note:**

> This is a set of Mirror Universe stories. Expect the morality and mortality rate that is characteristic of the Mirror Universe. Title is from the John Craigie song 'Dissect the Bird.'

I.

Hugh Culber dies at the age of five. Children die for millions of reasons in every universe, and in this universe, they die for millions more.

He’s born on a garrison station, his parents both soldiers of the Terran Empire – what else could they be. They wonder if they should raise their child somewhere safe, maybe back on Terra, far behind the front lines of the war, but then they think better of it. They need to be on the front, and so does their child, to see the glory of the empire first hand, to rejoice in the destruction of rebels alongside his parents. No child has ever benefited from being coddled, from being shielded from the truth that is conquest. So Hugh grows up on Garrison 14, one of links in the chain that is throttling what is left of the Romulan Alliance. Many soldiers have children, and most have decided to keep them close, so the garrison labels one of the misused hangars a creche, and has off-duty menial staff watch the children at play.

Hugh likes to play hopscotch and wallclimb, but he hates football. He is five years old, his favorite color is red, his favorite food is red nutribar (berry flavored), his favorite animals are cats although he’s only ever seen them in holovids, his favorite toy is a little plastic keyboard, and his best friend is Yelena because she has a nice singing voice. His hair has grown quite long, and he absentmindedly chews on it whenever he’s thinking hard about something, which is often. He likes to think about holobooks and he likes to think about stories and and he likes to think about the Empire, how big it is and how hard his parents are working on making it even bigger, he hopes he can go see all of it when he’s grown up. He likes to stare out through the forcefields of the hangar, and think about how every pinpoint of light is a star, and every star has planets, and all the planets are full of people, and all the people have favorite animals and colors and foods and songs, and maybe some of them are also looking out at the stars thinking the same thing. He likes thinking about that, but it makes him feel a bit dizzy.

The Romulan attack comes without warning. The garrison quickly goes to red alert, all hands on deck fight valiantly and their station doesn’t fall. They hold out until reinforcements arrive, and together they drive the Romulans out and avenge the loss of human lives sevenfold and with great relish. But that no longer matters to Hugh Culber: when the first photon torpedo hits, the shields of the hangar are breached immediately, and Hugh is cast into space alongside eight other children, two off-duty mechanics and a janitor. Their death is swift, and they have no time to be afraid, which is almost a mercy.

II.

The day Romulans attack Garrison 14, a mechanic picks up something while she’s idly tinkering with a downed shuttle’s sensor equipment, and she gets a bad feeling about whatever it is she picked up, and she moves quickly enough to shove most of the kids into an escape pod and launch them full-speed out of the system, out of the way of the fighting. Hugh Culber survives.

Hugh Culber lives long enough to learn to read, long enough to graduate the secondary education network with top marks and a red-gold commendation, long enough to decide he wants to become a doctor, long enough to get accepted into the elite Terran Academy of Field Medicine, long enough to get through the first four months of grueling physical and theoretical training, to make it to something most med students think of as a milestone, as sort of a treat: his first vivisection. The bodies they get for dissection tend to be human, and there is never a shortage of them, after all, there is a war going on. But the bodies they vivisect are more varied: Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites. (They don’t waste Kelpian on medical students, those go straight to the kitchen.) The Empire rarely takes prisoners, but makes good use of them when it does: it wrings all the information it can from its captives, using meticulous psychological tactics and state-of-the-art agonizer booths and on the more traditional ships, a good old-fashioned kicking, but after the interrogators are done, there is still some educational value to be extracted from the gibbering, torture-mad captives.

Hugh’s study group gets an Orion, a scrawny little male with its green skin peeling and paling to the color of rotten seaweed. It’s conscious when they wheel it in, as they always are, a paralytic agent pinning its body in place, numbing its vocal chords, but leaving it fully awake. Its eyes dart to and fro, taking in the room, the students in scrubs, the surgical equipment. Its lips move, mutely forming words while the surgical instructor explains where and how he’ll make the first incision. The silent mumbling stops, warps into a frozen scream the moment the instructor’s laser cuts into its flesh, but restarts as the instructor uses a pointer to indicate separate anatomical features revealed where he peeled back green skin and sickly yellowish muscle. The muscle structure is remarkable humanlike, but the sharper, sleeker shape of its off-white bones betrays its alien nature.

It’s not that Paul pities the subject, not at first. He knows that according to protocol, it’s going to be kept alive for a whole semester’s worth of anatomy lessons, stripped to the bone and disassembled organ by organ while still alive, and then it’ll be discarded. He has no reason to question protocol. But he grows curious about the mumbling, the same silent words repeated over and over again as they slowly, over a week, pick apart its left arm, and start work on its torso. He doesn’t understand it, and he wants to, and Hugh, at the age of nineteen, has not yet learned to leave well enough alone. There is no automatic translation to be had, after all, the Terran Empire never needed to develop a universal translator, but fortunately Hugh has friends in Communications. Kara studies Enemy Languages, one day she’ll be tasked with intercepting and decoding rebels’ transmissions, and she owes Hugh for that one time he smuggled her meds for Denebian Rot instead of reporting her to the disciplinary committee. She spends half an hour watching and rewatching the video Hugh had surreptitiously taken of the Orion’s face, then poring over phoneme tables and core vocabulary lists. Hugh expects the mumbling to translate to some pathetic plea, please, maybe, or stop, let it end. He doesn’t know if Orions have religion, but if they do, prayer seems like a reasonable option. Although the creature looks broken and docile, he would not be surprised to hear that it is swearing at them, cursing its captors, denouncing them, chanting to himself the rebel’s motto since Orion I was taken and the syndicate scattered, planetless, across the quadrant: the Free Traders remain free.

But Hugh guesses wrong._ My lover wears silver anklets, shining anklets, chiming anklets, my lover wears anklets far more beauteous than yours._ That’s it, that’s all, over and over again. A fragment of an old song, Kara says, one that she recognizes only because her communications instructor used it to demonstrate the proper pronunciation of Orion’s unique diphthongs. It’s from some ancient pre-conquest Orion opera. Hugh hears that, and is already lost. He knows it is wrong to torture a sentient being, he has known it all along, but he has locked that knowledge away from himself, as did anyone with a conscience who wanted to survive in the Terran Empire. But all it took was a little detail, a little hint of something familiar, the realization that this other creature held into music the same way he did, like it was a comfort, a lifeline, the one certain thing in a shifting world, that was all it took to make the nameless Orion’s death suddenly unacceptable. All it took was the thought _I wonder what Orion operas sounded like _to make him feel, suddenly and brutally, the loss of a culture, a species, an entire universe. All the denied knowledge, all the evil he had seen with his own eyes floods back, it sweeps Hugh away, pushes him to act, pushes him to act quickly and without thinking, with the rage and despair of two decades of suppressed rebellion.

They catch him trying to drag the semi-conscious, hastily bandaged Orion to one of the warp-capable shuttles. He had a good escape plan, he left while everyone was watching the imperial envoy’s latest announcement, he picked just the right path through the educational complex to avoid all patrol routes, he stole or forged all the accesses that he needed to get off-planet, but he didn’t reckon with the obvious, that Kara would report him and show up leading an intercept team. Hugh doesn’t run, he turns to fight and is shot down knowing that he tried to do the right thing, knowing that he failed, and not knowing whether the Orion died or was carted back to its stasis chamber, awaiting further torture.

III.

Hugh Culber, age nineteen, realizes that the Orion he has to dissect is singing through the pain, and does nothing. He watches, and knows that they are cutting up something that had a song in it once, and he does nothing. He goes back to his room, puts on his headphones, turns the volume all the way up and realizes he can no longer hear the music. He can hear the notes, he recognizes the melody of _Still She Walks the Shores of Fate, _his favorite aria, but he can’t quite hear the feelings anymore.

The next time they call on him to assist in the vivisection, his hands shake too badly to hold the laser scalpel straight. He drops out of the class. In debate class, he is hesitant to argue for the use of hydrogen bombs on non-military settlements, and is trounced when his opponent points out that as long as an army is fed non-replicated food, it is logical to attack the means of agricultural production. He drops out of debate class. In hand-to-hand combat class, he’s unwilling to hit his opponent again once they’re down, and gets punch in the guts and a kick in the crotch for his momentary hesitation. He drops out of combat class too. He’s still scraping by in his theoretical courses, but he’s a mess when it comes to practice, he can’t even administer a simple hypospray without fumbling it twice. Every time he’s in the sickbay, seeing people’s cuts and scrapes treated, seeing soldiers brought back from the brink of death, he feels an inappropriate urge to giggle, or possibly to scream: what’s the point of saving these people, what’s the point of saving some and killing others? He develops a reputation for eccentricity, unreliability. Weakness.

At the start of the course, he was assigned a rather good dorm room to reward his high academic score: a small single room with an actual window, halfway between the mess hall and the gym, not far from the operating theater. One of his friends, one of the people he used to call his friends, challenges him to a duel over it. Hugh doesn’t quite concede, but he can’t seem to muster the effort to fight back either. He ends up with three broken fingers and no place to sleep. He drops out of medical school.

He tries to find something to do. He doesn’t really know what. He used to see the point of medicine, and he no longer does. The thought of being a doctor, having power over life and death, terrifies him. He struggles through a lab technician’s certification he chose more-or-less at random, and settles into a quiet, inconsequential life. He sleepwalks through work and spends his free time listlessly picking up and discarding hobby after hobby. Whenever someone wants to promote him, if only because of how long he’s been around, he demurs and refuses. He doesn’t want responsibility, he doesn’t want to be involved, he wants to cause as little harm as he can, so he keeps slicing tissue samples and labeling Petri dishes. He stays quiet, he keeps to himself and he doesn’t hurt anyone. He knows that the laboratory he’s working for is developing biological weapons, he knows that every mindless, tedious test he runs is another step towards a deadlier formula, he knows that somewhere on Antares VI a peaceful race perishes as the lining of their lungs slowly dissolves – but he’s just an underling, he’s not giving the orders, he’s just obeying them, and that’s better, isn’t it?

He dies at the age of eighty-six, having lived a life of very little consequence.

IV.

Hugh Culber, age nineteen, is invited to assist in the vivisection of a being he knows is sentient, a being he knows sings opera. His hands are unsteady, and while trying to make a clean incision that mimics the instructors’, he cuts through the thick pearly-pink connective tissue at the wrong angle. Instead of revealing the fine mesh of the secondary filtering organ, he severs the anterior lymphatic reservoir, and the subject is dead within a minute, weakly twitching then laying still in a pool of clear ichor. Hugh is reprimanded, his instructor gives him an extra week of cleanup duty, and his classmates are pissed at him for a day or two when they find out that they’re going to have to continue vivisection on a much less interesting subject, a long brain-dead Vulcan.

As far as Hugh can tell, nobody ever guesses that he did it on purpose. They think he was careless, they think he barely skimmed the xenobiology readings, they aren’t surprised, because nobody really reads those. Terran medics are only ever going to treat human patients after all, and their one xenobio class is considered a joke even by the instructors themselves. Vivisection has never been about teaching xenobiology, not really: it was about demonstrating the power of humanity over alien flesh. This means nobody knows that Hugh considered rescuing the Orion, realized that he could not possibly pull it off, and settled on the next best thing. Nobody knows that Hugh spent three days researching the fastest, surest way to kill an Orion, trying to find a way to make it look like an accident, make it plausible. He then spent two more days expunging all traces of his search from the school network, hating that he has to delay his work, but knowing he must be thorough. After it is done, and the Orion’s useless corpse is thrown in the incinerator, he goes back to the dorm, puts on _Still She Walks the Shores of Fate, _and tries to cry. The tears don’t come. What arrives instead is a cold sort of resolve.

Hugh keeps it together. He works hard, he gets top grades, he talks fast, he cuts clean, he shoots straight, in hand-to-hand combat he twists until he hears bone crack. He excels in field medicine simulations, and develops a disarmingly brisk bedside manner. On weekends, he drinks a little too much, but not nearly enough to make him stand out. He’s widely considered a stone cold badass, a man who’ll make CMO by forty, maybe by thirty if he kills or fucks the right people. His only eccentricity is taking an extra Enemy Languages credit, learning Simplified Vulcan on Tuesdays, teaching himself rebellion’s lingua franca.

He makes sure he’s ready before he deserts, but he doesn’t wait for graduation. He signs out of the dorm, tells his friends he’s going to visit family, tells his family he’s going to stay with friends, not a brilliant tactic of evasion, but still, the fact that they don’t care enough to check will buy him a few days’ time. He doesn’t dare cross the front line openly, instead he disappears into one of the shady, pirate-infested moons of Alpha Cygnus IV. He uses most of his savings to hire a private contractor to smuggle him to Camp Tlegh, a rebel outpost. The lowlife predictably tries to kidnap and sell him, but is dissuaded when Hugh shoves a phaser into his back. It took him a month to sneak that phaser out of the armory, piece by piece: he didn’t want to take his own assigned weapon with him, knowing it would be ridiculously easy to track.

At Tlegh, he is relieved of his phaser, forced to undergo a lengthy, undignified process of frisking and decontamination in a series of small, sparsely furnished rooms in an underground bunker before he’s allowed to see the outpost’s commander, a massive, scar-covered Klingon.

‘We were short on field medics anyway,’ he says, and that is how Hugh Culber, age twenty-four, joins the Rebellion.

Five months later, Rebellion Medic Hugh Culber is shot dead during a failed raid on the starship ISS Kutuzov. His team had successfully infiltrated the ship, made it to the brig and broken out the prisoners they had come for, they were already on their way out when the Kutuzov’s captain, Evgeny Harper, discovered them and blocked their path. With luck and some well-aimed shots they even managed to make it past Harper, left him bleeding out with a Ligonian razorbolt in his shoulder, but they couldn’t stop him from calling a shipwide alert and initiating lockdown protocol. Nothing enters the ship, nothing leaves it. The internal shielding is up, communicators are scrambled, the transporters all offline: it is impossible to beam to safety. The rebel party decides to try and steal one of the Kutuzov’s own shuttles, then somehow maneuver it out of photon torpedo range. It’s less of a real escape plan and more of a last-ditch effort to die on their feet, but they nevertheless try. Hugh dies in the ensuing firefight between rebels and Terran soldiers. He does his best, he shoots straight and he moves fast and he keeps his cool: what kills him in the end is friendly fire. No matter how much his team likes him, no matter how much they trust him, their hands still remember that humans are a threat and a target, and Hugh is an armed human in a firefight, whooping with the joy of the kill, the monster his Vulcan and Klingon companions have feared since childhood. Engineer Tal regrets pulling the trigger the moment it happens, but by then, Hugh is gone. The last thing he sees is the red flash of the shipwide alert.

V.

Hugh Culber survives a Romulan attack at the age of five, makes it through medical school, kills the man he was meant to vivisect and grows to hate the empire he was meant to serve, defects to the rebellion and finds himself dressed in rebel greens, with a phaser in one hand and an emergency medkit in the other, pinned down by enemy fire behind a bulkhead on the command deck of the starship ISS Kutuzov, four comrades by his side, two badly weakened prisoners behinds him. He has to get them off the ship, but while the Kutuzov’s under lockdown protocol, there isn’t the remotest hope of beaming back to the warbird that could whisk them to relative safety. Only the captain could give the all clear, and like most starship captains, Captain Harper would rather face torture, rather face death than give up control of his ship.

That same Captain Harper, famously brutal, bloodthirsty and paranoid Harper is currently shooting at them and swearing at his own security officers to stop being cowards and kill the intruders already. Hugh readies himself to go out fighting, considers turning around to shoot the prisoners, sparing them the inevitable horrors that would await them upon recapture, when Engineer Tal motions him to shield his eyes, and throws one of her homemade flash grenades into the corridor. The spark of light is blinding even with his back turned and his eyes covered, and when Hugh turns back around, he sees only five Terran soldiers staggering around, one of them the captain. They have a few moments until reinforcements arrive, and Tal begins taking out the incapacitated Terrans, her aim sure, her eyes cold, she’s far past anger or vengeance, and is acting on mere long-established habit, taking as many of them down with her has she can, Sergeant Yarul matching her phaser shots with his own bolts from a few steps back. Hugh sees the Captain on the ground, clamping a hand against his bleeding shoulder, rubbing his eyes with the other, blinking, swearing, trying to struggle upright. One of Yarul’s razorbolts must have found its mark – the Ligonian prefers old-fashioned projectiles over energy weapons, and Hugh can see why. Harper is in great pain, the barbs dig into his flesh and the anticoagulant poison is starting to take effect, he’s bleeding profusely, not yet badly enough for the blood loss to be life-threatening, but badly enough to weaken him, to disorient him. Hugh has a sudden, desperate idea. He motions Tal to stop shooting, hands her his phaser, shrugs out of his forest green jacket, and walks out onto the corridor in his undershirt, unarmed save for his tricorder.

‘Sir, I’ve got you,’ he says, stepping up to Harper. ‘I’ll have to treat that immediately or you’ll bleed out.’

Harper struggles, tries to say something, but Hugh kneels on the floor next to him and forges on, brisk, disarming, every inch a doctor.

‘I need you to stay still, sir.’

Harper, in quite a lot of pain, and relieved to see a doctor, relieved to see someone who seems to know what they’re doing, stays still. The three-pronged arrowhead is meant to be difficult to extract from flesh, it forces the muscles to contract around it, dragging it deeper, causing ever more damage, pumping the poison deeper. Harper grunts with pain, hisses when Hugh takes hold of the barb, his tears mix with the sweat on his face, and it clearly takes all his strength not to start bawling like a child. The pain really must be quite terrible.

‘I’m sorry this is uncomfortable, sir, but it will only take a second,’ continues Hugh, calm, the way he would talk to any patient. He rests his free hand on Harper’s chest, holds him still. ‘Hold on, sir.’

He finally yanks the barb free, the man gasps, sobs, and goes limp as Hugh presses a hypospray to his neck, slowly relaxing as the analgesic takes effect. He then blinks sleepily, shakes his head, trying to get his bearings and take control once again. Blood is still gushing freely from his shoulder, soaking through his shirt, pooling on the floor.

‘That’s right, sir, it’s out,’ continues Hugh. ‘You did very good, now to close the wound...’

‘I’ll kill the bastard that did this,’ growls Harper. Hugh sets to work on stemming the flow of blood, his hands gentle but firm.

‘Yessir,’ agrees Hugh, focusing on applying the strips of the portable dermal regenerator to Harper’s skin. ‘They left the ship, sir. Now I’ll need to counteract the poison-’

‘What?’ grunts Harper.

‘They stunned you, sir, and they made it to the shuttle bay,’ explains Hugh, calm, matter-of-fact, distantly marveling that he doesn’t sound at all like he’s making it up as he goes. ‘They are sticking close to the ship, and First Officer Braha said using photon torpedoes would be too risky.’

‘Fuck Braha,’ says Harper. Hugh reaches into the medkit, and begins assembling an injection of coagulant factor. ‘Fuck Braha and fuck the photon torpedoes, why didn’t she send a landing party?’

‘They couldn’t beam over, sir,’ says Hugh, seeing the milky-white factor turn pale green in its vial as it mixes with the liquid vehicle. ‘The lockdown...’

‘Damn the lockdown,’ grunts Harper, trying to rise, falling down, still too weak to even sit upright. ‘Where’s my communicator?’

‘Careful, sir,’ admonishes Hugh, kneeling closer and helping him sit up, propping him up gently without touching his bad shoulder. Harper gives him a look of helpless, quickly concealed gratitude. Hugh smiles in response and hands him a communicator, a matte gray device, not even Starfleet issue, but fortunately similar looking, similar enough that Harper, in pain and drugged up and dizzy from blood loss, staring into the calm, open, trustworthy face of the man who saved him, doesn’t think to check before flipping it open, doesn’t notice that instead of a Captain’s straight-to-bridge line, its default setting calls Handler Wrannel of the rebel forces, standing by aboard the cloaked warbird shadowing the Kutuzov, anxiously calibrating and re-calibrating transporter coordinates.

‘Braha, you incompetent idiot,’ Harper barks. ‘Transporters online, now, captain’s override Green Cadmium Alpha. Now get together-’ Hugh stabs the hypospray into Harper’s neck, shoves him to the floor as he starts convulsing, the quadruple dose of Vulcan coagulant factor solidifying his blood into gelatin, grabs the communicator, yells ‘you’ve got the override, take us out, now’, and the next second he, his companions and rescuees are all aboard the warbird, speeding away from the ISS Kutuzov as fast as warp will take them.

Half an hour later he’s in sickbay, tending to the rescued prisoners. One of them, the Orion known as Agent Thelev is already under sedation – he’s going to need emergency surgery on three of his kidneys. The other prisoner, the real objective of the rescue mission is a frail Vulcan woman, Grand Spymaster T’Pau. She is shorter than he expected the resistance’s lead intelligence officer to be, and she doesn’t look all that imposing in her hospital gown, covered in fading bruises and missing multiple teeth. She seems alert and in no immediate danger, but nevertheless he runs a full diagnostic, temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood copper, psywaves, all the tests one runs on an ailing Vulcan. He feels strange, unreal, and knows that the moment he stops working, he will quite probably break down.

‘What you did back there,’ she say. ‘It was quite terrifying.’

‘I didn’t know what I was doing, honestly,’ says Hugh, hooking up an IV, adding iron trichloride to a low-sodium solution, per standard protocol for re-hydrating Vulcans.

‘You were doing what you’re doing now,’ she sighs, impatient. ‘You were being kind and helpful. And it worked. The man believed you to be part of his own ship’s medical personnel even though he has never seen you before, even though you were out of uniform, even though you had appeared out of nowhere and logic dictated you were the enemy. The flash grenade was on your side and so was the blood loss, the pain, the disorientation, but everything else was against you, especially Harper’s paranoia. It’s well-known that the man trusts nobody.’

‘I think when you trust nobody,’ says Hugh, ‘when you haven’t trusted anybody for years, it’s easier to be taken in by someone who seems trustworthy. I mean they must miss it, right? They must miss trust. I did nothing special.’

The woman smiles, or at least purses her lips in a way that Hugh has learnt amounts to a smile for Vulcans. At that moment, she looks surprisingly regal, even sitting in a hospital bed in a silly gown.

‘You do have a capacity for appearing out of nowhere and finding friends, even where logic dictates that you can only be the enemy,’ she continues. ‘I notice that you have been with us for five months now, and none of your superiors even wondered if you were a Terran plant. Nobody, all the way up the chain of command, all the way up to me. I’m not surprised you earned their trust, young man, but I’m unnerved by how completely you avoided their suspicion.’

She smiles another one of her cryptic non-smiles, and Hugh suspects he might be executed, or at the very least forced to undergo a lengthy psychic-assisted interrogation.

‘You’re wasted in the medical corps,’ she says instead. ‘Have you thought about espionage?’

* * *

I.

Paul Stamets wakes up sore, sticky and disoriented. Blinking his eyes open, he sees the familiar greyscale pattern of the ceiling in his own quarters aboard the ISS Charon. And closer, sitting cross-legged on his own bed, he sees that lovely little lab technician he took home the night before. Henry? Hugo? Something like that. The boy is tapping away at a handheld, seemingly preoccupied with whatever he’s doing, but still blissfully naked. Paul spends a few moments just taking it in. He really is something. Of course Paul Stamets doesn’t usually get worked up about one night stands, that's why they are all one night stands, but this one was quite a spectacular kisser, and when he held Paul, pressed him down on the bed, it made Paul feel _safe_, which is just preposterous. Time for round two, or maybe to kick him out of the room and go back to sleep, he hasn’t decided yet.

‘Oh, you’re up,’ says the visitor. ‘Good, I wanted to talk to you.’

Paul doesn’t really feel like talking, and he doesn’t even feel like explaining that he doesn’t feel like talking, so he gets out of bed… and immediately hits an invisible barrier.

‘Come on, I said I wanted to talk,’ repeats the stranger, and Paul begins to get worried. He looks around and spots the tiny forcefield generator clipped to the wall nearby, and the shimmering distortions of light that reveal the perfect shield it casts around the bed. The generator isn't fleet issue, but it seems just as strong, if not stronger.

‘They scramble all the bugs in your quarters, too,’ adds the stranger helpfully. ‘As far as your video feed is concerned, we’re both still asleep.’

‘Who are you?’ Paul asks, raising himself to his full height. ‘What do you want?’

The stranger just stares at him until he realizes that he too is completely naked, grabs a sheet and wraps it around his waist.

‘My name really is Hugh, but as you can probably tell, I’m not a lab assistant,’ the stranger answers, setting down the padd. ‘And I came here to kill you, or to kidnap you. I’d much prefer the latter, but of course the choice is up to you.’

‘Wait, so you’re one of Lorca’s people? Or Wei’s? Hey, are you from the Institute of Metabiological Research? Because I told them that I’m not interested...’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Hugh says. ‘None of them could have gotten this close to you. I’m Rebellion.’

Shock renders Paul momentarily speechless. Rebellion agents were... they were monsters. They were ruthless camouflaged assassins like the Gamma Kanaris killer, cutting a swathe through the top-ranking Terran officers, or master manipulators like the infamous Bemana of Betazed, wrenching men’s secret from their unwilling minds, or untraceable, inescapable specters like the Sehlat. Even Section 31 personnel only spoke of the Sehlat in whispers. Rebellion agents were monsters, not soft-spoken smiling _human_ lab assistants like the man currently sitting in his bed. He briefly wonders if the whole thing is a practical joke, but then remembers that nobody on the ship would dare to do such a thing. They all had occasion to learn that people who harm him tend to end up breathing vacuum, and that the people who inconvenience him usually suffer the same fate. This must be real, then.

‘What does the rebellion want with me?’ he asks finally, his voice an uneven croak.

‘They want you to take a good look at this,’ says Hugh, pushing a few keys on his handheld and activating its holographic projector. A complex mesh of silver threads appears in the air, hovering above the bedclothes.

‘What is it?’ asks Paul, leaning closer, intrigued despite himself, then falls silent, because he knows, he recognizes at least a part of it: it’s a visualization of an equation he never quite managed to get right, a crucial and elusive step in safely transporting organic matter through the mycelial network. It’s an answer he’s been seeking for years now, an answer he can’t believe he’s seeing, and he wants to yell about it, yell at it, but he doesn’t. He can’t let the rebellion know what he’s working on.

‘We know what you’re working on,’ says the man in his bed. ‘And we know it’s killing you.’

‘It’s not!’ snaps Paul, automatically, idiotically defensive, cursing himself the next second.

‘You keep telling yourself that,’ Hugh counters. He pats the bedclothes next to himself, and Paul, shaken with nerves and unsure what else to do, sits. ‘You’re working fast, but not fast enough for the emperor. She pushes you for more, and you push yourself, trying to pretend the rash is just a rash, that your absence seizures are just absent-mindedness, hell, one time you got poisoned by a psilocybin-analogue so bad you were hearing colors a week later, and you still managed to convince everyone that you got high on purpose.’

‘I’ve cultivated a reputation for eccentricity,’ huffs Paul. ‘I’m Paul Stamets, I do crazy things for science all the time, I might just be crazy enough to take shrooms for research purposes.’ This stranger seems to have extensive knowledge of his mistakes and weaknesses, and that is mortifying. He also seems to care, he seems genuinely concerned, and that fills Paul with a strange baffled warmth.

‘How do you know about my symptoms, anyway?’ he asks, to break the silence.

‘It’s my job to learn more about you, Paul,’ the stranger - Hugh - answers, with a self-deprecating shrug. ‘I’ve been watching you for months, even before I got transferred to this ship.’

‘But if you’ve had me under observation for, what, a year, why go to all this trouble just to show me this… this thing? Couldn’t you have just sent it to me?’

‘I wanted to give you time to think about it, and to do that I needed to get you alone,’ the man explains. ‘You’re not alone in the mess hall, you’re not alone in your workshop, you’re followed by assistants and flunkies and cadets almost everywhere you go. Getting you alone in bed seemed like the only option, and even that took some persuading.’

Paul suddenly remembers the previous night, the exclusive party in the darkened observation lounge, and the lovely little lab tech who only showed up because he, Paul, asked him. He remembers the boy, Hugh, looking around the room intimidated by the already mostly naked crowd, then shyly shrugging off his shirt to let Paul show him off, gamely kissing everyone who asked, then pulling back, begging off, finding his way back to Paul, pressing his body against Paul’s, shivering, asking, unsteadily, his face hidden in Paul’s neck, breathing _let me_ and _I want_ and _only you_ and _take me, have me all to yourself _and _please please please _and Paul thought, fuck it, a sweet shy clingy boy like this is worth missing the orgy for, once in a while. Damn. It’s deeply embarrassing to remember how easy he was to manipulate, and what’s worse, he gets chills remembering how good it felt to be manipulated. He suddenly realizes that he’s sitting far too close to the man, close enough to smell his sweat, to feel the heat of his body, and his mouth goes dry with misplaced, ill-timed desire.

Trying to get his bearings, he has another look at the holograph, and feels breathless all over again. The pathways it posits are not pathways through the mycelial plane, from one real-world location to another, but pathways within the plane, like desire paths trodden by something that considers the terrifying alien mess of the mycelium its native element.

‘How did you get this?’ he manages to croak.

‘It’s easy to miss the obvious when all your research personnel are completely devoid of psychic sensitivity,’ Hugh answers, slightly smug. ‘But our Vulcan and Betazoid colleagues listen better. They made telepathic contact with a species that dwells within the plane itself, and are basing their calculation on new information, inside information.’

‘And what am I supposed to do about this?’ asks Paul, his heart already racing, wanting to see the rest of the research, wanting to delve into its complexities, wanting it so badly his hands shake.

‘I want you to defect to the Rebellion,’ says Hugh, clicking off the projection.

‘What?’

‘I want you to leave your current posting, and instead come work with us on one of our hidden research stations,’ he explains, as if it was a completely reasonable suggestion. ‘Help us develop the spore drive before the Empire does, and grace the rebel scientific community with your presence.’

‘You want me to abandon the empire, leave everything I’ve ever known and run off to the edge of the galaxy to play house with aliens just because you showed me a better model for extra-planar movement?’ Paul springs to his feet, and begins to pace, only to realize the forcefield still cuts off his path, and stop after a single step. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘You’re Paul Staments,’ smiles Hugh. ‘You do crazy things for science all the time.’

‘And if I don’t go?’

‘Then I’ll have to kill you,’ continues Hugh, still with that same disarming smile, not as if he didn’t mean it, but as if he meant it and was trying to be polite about it. ‘Then I’d probably have to kill myself to avoid capture, my chances of getting off this ship with you dead are infinitesimal.’

‘What about your chances of getting out with me alive?’ asks Paul, curious despite himself.

‘Those are not bad,’ Hugh says. ‘If you start packing now, you’ll be done by 0800, then you can report to… whoever’s on shift... maybe Commander Devereux, tell her that you’re taking me and one of the shuttles for a research trip to… what’s close by… Indigirka Glacial Moon V.’

‘Won’t she see through my incredibly flimsy excuse?’ asks Paul, exasperated.

‘Oh, she will,’ he explains, already calculating something on his handheld. ‘Luckily you’re a terrible liar, and she’ll know you’re hiding something right away. But then she’ll look at me carrying your suitcase, put it together with the rumor that you left the party early, and assume that your research trip is an excuse to take me off-planet to fuck me silly in a tent somewhere, without having to share me. Since you have done the exact same thing three times in the past with three different companions, and since the empire is willing to tolerate your eccentricities in exchange for your invaluable research, she’ll let you go. Once we’re out of sensor range, I can arrange our pickup.’

‘By your rebel friends.’

‘Exactly.’

Paul tries to think. He wants to pace, he cannot stand still, but there’s no room. He settles for rocking back and forth on his bare feet.

‘If I say no, you kill me,’ he says, just to make sure. The other man nods.

‘If I say yes, and try to sabotage it, you kill me anyway,’ he adds. Another nod. Paul shouldn’t find this honesty reassuring, but despite himself, he does.

‘But if you were going to force me to go with you under pain of death, why all this fuss? Why show me the pathways? Why...’ and he gestures at Hugh’s naked body, still shining with sweat and still looking, despite the fact that he is a deadly enemy spy, entirely delicious.

‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ Hugh answers. ‘And the only way to get you off the ship, the only way to have a real chance of success, is to make you come willingly. If I force you, someone will notice. But if people see us walk down the corridor together, and they see you genuinely eager to get into that shuttle with me, they won’t suspect that I’m about to whisk you off to a rebel waystation.’

‘That seems like a clever idea except for the fact that I don’t in the slightest want to go with you,’ huffs Paul. But even as he says it, he knows he’s lying. It’s not just that he doesn’t want to die, although he doesn’t want to die. But more than that, he wants to go and find out what this telepathic alien research team knows about the mycelial network, he wants answers even if they come at the cost of his career, the cost of his friends, the cost of his old life. He knows they may come at the cost of his life altogether: if he has to live in fear every day even at the heart of the empire, he can’t imagine the danger he’ll be in once he’s out among the savages. And yet he wants, he wants so badly to go, he can’t imagine anywhere else he’d rather be, except maybe under the covers with Hugh in a world where they don’t have to have this conversation.

He can’t keep looking at the stranger in his room, so he sinks back on the bed and buries his face in his hands.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he mumbles, trying to gather himself, trying to resist. ‘A rebel spy is trying to seduce me with nudity and mushrooms. Why is this happening. Why couldn’t they send someone clever, at least?’

‘Oh, they could have sent much smarter agents, but you don’t fuck aliens,’ says Hugh cheerily. ‘Anyway, if you’re worried whether I am good enough to get you out of here safely, don’t be. I may not be the best, but I’ve done it before.’

‘You talked the emperor’s favored innovator into willingly walking off the imperial flagship to work on esoteric spore science in a bunker full of vicious aliens?’ asks Paul, raising his head.

‘No, not exactly that’, Hugh demurs. ‘I was behind the assassination of Captain Pike though. I incited the riots that led to the secession of the Mirage V mining colony, and I was the one who leaked the blueprints of Commodore MacAllister’s prototype warship.'

‘Come on,’ argues Paul. ‘You must have hoped I was completely ignorant of rebel activity, but I do follow the news. Those were all attributed to the Sehlat.’

‘And that would mean…,’ prompts Hugh.

‘You’re the Sehlat,’ exclaims Paul. ‘Wow. I just assumed he’d be a Vulcan.’

‘I trained with Vulcans, and they gave me the name,’ answers Hugh. ‘Apparently they think I’m very cuddly.’

‘With razor-sharp teeth,’ adds Paul weakly.

Hugh grins, his bright blunt human teeth shine, and Paul feels an answering smile form on his own face. Hugh types a sequence into the handheld and the forcefield dissipates with a quiet hum. Hugh then takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders and gets off the bed, extending a hand towards Paul, reaching, inviting. Paul knows that he still has a choice, he knows that he can try to run or scream or fight his way out and that he might very well make it, and he doesn’t move. He knows, he helplessly knows that he’s going to take that hand and he’s going to seal the deal, he’s going to yank on yesterday’s clothes without bothering to shower, he’ll throw a few nutribars, an encrypted padd and three containers of spore specimens into a suitcase, march into the ready room crazed and disheveled to announce that he’s taking a research trip, then he’ll walk straight off the ship and into the shuttle and follow this strange sweet terrifying man out into the black, all the way to the distant glimmering fringes of the galaxy where no Terran has gone before.


End file.
